slack-handed

slack-handed adjective: careless and inactive; lacking focus or initiative.

Adjective

slack-handed (comparative more slack-handed, superlative most slack-handed)

Careless and inactive; lacking focus or initiative.
- Their warmth stirred her up to be so busy and laudably benevolent; perhaps if he had been away she might have been idle and slack-handed; but I do not know.1867, Rhoda Broughton, Not wisely, but too well: A Novel, page 155
- It was the fate of the Creoles—possibly a climatic result—to be slack-handed and dilatory.2000, George Washington Cable, Creoles of Louisiana, →ISBN
Done carelessly; slapdash.
- Solomon had a thorough contempt for slothful, slack-handed farming, and lost no opportunity of giving drowsy ignorance a view of its own deformity, and its own certain fate.1854, The Valley Farmer: A Monthly Journal of Agriculture, Volumes 6-7
- On the whole a great deal of slack-handed service was put up with.1913, Julian Alvin Carroll Chandler, Franklin Lafayette Riley, James Curtis Ballagh, The South in the Building of the Nation, page 206
Having or done with hands that are slack.
- She motions with the needle across the station to the paralysed, slack-handed clock.1999, Caroline Adderson, A History of Forgetting, page 353
- The gun jiggled in a slack-handed grip, but the trigger finger looked tight.2001, Simon Bucher-Jones, Kelly Hale, Grimm Reality, →ISBN

slack-handed (comparative more slack-handed, superlative most slack-handed)

Done with hands or wrists that are slack.
- No less stunned, I stood there, too, slack-handed, empty of thought.2011, Geraldine McCaughrean, Not the End of the World, →ISBN
- Gallyon took his glass and held it slack-handed, elbow resting on the arm of his chair.2013, Jeff Gulvin, The Aden Vanner Novels, →ISBN
Idly or carelessly.
- Yet they sit slack-handed, doing nothing about it, unable to agree even among themselves.1940, Bob Brown, Can we co-operate?, page 127
- If I told her the same thing she only giggled and said, "Yessum," and then, slack-handed, went right ahead and ironed a dozen wrinkles into the simplest piece.1957, Janice Holt Giles, The Believers, page 15

slack-handed (uncountable)

A collection of slack-handed people.
- But what saith the wise man of the sluggards and slack-handed, in so favourable an opportunity ?1849, William Evans, Thomas Evans, The Friends' Library, page 74
- But you see, sir," turning to me, " I'm not one as has been brought up among the slack-handed of these days.1857, Anne Marsh-Caldwell, The Rose of Ashurst - Volume 1

கைச் சோர்வுடைய, செயற்சோர்வுடைய

His autocracy had been transformed into a system of feudal baronies, with president Fitzsimmons as the slack-handed overseer.2015, James Neff, Mobbed Up, →ISBN:
Edna gave us a slack-handed wave as I agitated the road gravel.2007, Ed Lynskey, The Blue Cheer, →ISBN, page 149:
Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack-handed from the gunwhales while one of their colleagues drowned.2010, Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons, →ISBN:
And also there were nights when one stair in a creaking flight, where darkies strained on hawsers or slack-handed loped between the sheds2000, Lee Ann Sandweiss, Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City, 1670-2000, →ISBN, page v:

From slack + handed.

What does slack-handed mean?: Slack-handed means careless and inactive; lacking focus or initiative.
What is slack-handed in Tamil?: Slack-handed in Tamil is கைச் சோர்வுடைய, செயற்சோர்வுடைய. See Slack-handed meaning in Tamil.
How do you use slack-handed in a sentence?: His autocracy had been transformed into a system of feudal baronies, with president Fitzsimmons as the slack-handed overseer.
What part of speech is slack-handed?: Slack-handed can be an adjective, an adverb or a noun.

Adapted from Wiktionary: slack-handed (page history and authors); slack-handed (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “slack-handed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/slack-handed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.